Media Reporting
Oct. 13, 2026
By Fiona André
In a statement shared exclusively with RNS, 35 organizations wrote that the decline in hate crimes registered by the FBI isn’t 'synonymous with safety.'
Three dozen organizations — including the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Sikh Coalition and the Union for Reform Judaism — have come out against the FBI’s 2026 Hate Crimes report, raising concerns about incomplete and unreliable data.In a statement shared exclusively with Religion News Service, 35 organizations contested the agency’s finding that hate crimes were on the decline, pointing to flawed methodology and an incomplete dataset. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting report, released in August, indicates the number of hate crimes reported to the agency dropped by 7% between 2024 and 2025.
“We don’t want people to just run the hate crimes numbers. We want there to be a more complete story of what’s actually threatening our communities,” said Benjamin Suarato, director of advocacy and public affairs at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which led the initiative. “Our safety is very much linked to the safety of other communities.”
In their statement, the groups wrote that the decline isn’t “synonymous with safety” and raised concerns over a “number of deliberate policy choices being made by the current administration — particularly the increase in aggressive immigration enforcement, dramatic funding cuts and continued extremist rhetoric — we are concerned that the reporting is becoming less reliable even as threats are increasing.”
The FBI’s annual report compared the number of hate crimes reported in 2024 with the number reported in 2025 by law enforcement agencies that submitted at least six months of relevant data. The number of hate crime incidents it registered for 2025 marked “the largest year-to-year decline in violent crime rates” since it began tracking in 1936. In total, it counted 10,881 hate crime incidents that resulted in 13,026 offenses. Of all single bias incidents registered by the agency, 23% were motivated by religion, 56% by race and 15% by sexual orientation.
According to the agency’s hate crime reporting methodology, law enforcement agencies voluntarily submit data, and the FBI doesn’t use estimates to account for any data that might be missing. The report says the agency received data from 86% of law enforcement agencies enrolled in its UCR program, covering 95% of the population.
The Department of Justice didn’t respond to RNS’ request for comment in time for publication.
The groups’ statement argues the absence of data from thousands of agencies serving nearly 17 million Americans makes the report “historically unreliable.” They also raised concerns over the lack of standardized practices in classifying hate crimes among law enforcement departments.
The organizations, which include a number of groups representing Asian Americans, also say the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations have deterred community members from reporting hate crimes to avoid clashes with law enforcement or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“There’s trust deficits, there’s language barriers, there’s fear of reprisal, and there’s also the sometimes lethal immigration enforcement practices, impersonation of federal ICE officers,” said Sim Attariwala, director of the anti-hate program at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, one of the signatories.
The groups also noted the FBI’s report doesn’t reflect that Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Arabs, Latinos, Black people and members of the LGBTQ+ community report experiencing an increase in hateful rhetoric regardless of the agency’s reported decline in hate crime incidents. The statement referred to political figures sharing hateful comments about certain communities and rhetoric “spreading unchecked” online, including on social media, video games and streaming platforms.
“Despite persistent underreporting, hate and violence continue to rise,” the statement reads. “From targeting houses of worship and congregants under the guise of protesting political differences, to the use of bigoted conspiracy theories like the debunked ‘Great Replacement’ theory, to justify dehumanizing policies, extremism is on the rise.”
They also criticized that resources and grants that helped groups report incidents were gutted. According to the Council on Criminal Justice, the Trump administration terminated 373 Department of Justice grants, nearly $820 million, $35 million of which funded the protection of hate crime victims.
The groups also charged that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has engaged less often with organizations that represent marginalized communities, arguing it has “redirected its resources toward interpretations of civil rights law that legitimize and risk emboldening actors who traffic in hate, exclusion and intolerance.”
Other faith-based organizations signing the statement include the Nexus Project, which tracks antisemitism; Faith for Safe Water; T’Ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization; the Muslim Civic Coalition; and Hindus for Human Rights.
